[TheCruxofBag]

Possibly a better fit for the celebrity/famous events section, I'll let an admin decide.

A 23-year-old woman, Sandra Birchmore, was found dead in her apartment in Canton, Massachusetts, on 4th February 2021, with death estimated as having happened on the 1st. She was approximately 8-10 weeks pregnant.

Local and state authorities initially ruled her death as suicide by hanging, with her body found seated on the bedroom floor with a duffel bag strap around her neck tied to a closet door handle. No suicide note was present at the scene.

Sandra's family and friends disputed the suicide ruling, stating she was excited about her pregnancy and the future. Pressure from relatives and the media intensified investigations by federal authorities, and in August 2024, former Stoughton Police Detective Matthew Farwell was charged federally. In October 2025, a superseding indictment added a second count related to the unborn child.

At age 12, Sandra had enrolled through the Stoughton Police Explorers youth program, where she met Farwell, then 25 and married. According to prosecutors, Farwell began sexually abusing and grooming Sandra when she was 15 and continued a sexual relationship into adulthood, sometimes while on duty.

Sandra found out she was pregnant in December 2020, and believed Farwell to be the father. Prosecutors claim Sandra told Farwell about her pregnancy and that she would expose their relationship, including to Farwell's wife, after which Farwell strangled her and staged the scene to look like a suicide. Subsequent DNA tests have proved that Farwell was not the father of Sandra's baby.

Farwell has pled not guilty, and the defence maintains that Sandra killed herself when Farwell ended the relationship. Sandra had mental health issues, and had written several notes in her journal in 2017 expressing a wish to kill herself and listing methods.

Surveillance video placed Farwell outside Sandra's apartment the night she is believed to have died, with him allegedly being inside for 28 minutes (the defence says he was there merely to end the relationship). The prosecutors have alleged that some of Sandra's injuries - such as haemorrhage of the left sternothyroid muscle, and a fracture of her right side hyoid bone - are more congruent with homicide.

In April, the medical examiner who initially proclaimed Sandra's death a suicide updated the death certificate, changing the cause of death from "asphyxia by hanging" to "asphyxia", and manner from "suicide" to "undetermined".

Farwell faces two federal charges - killing a witness or victim, and causing the death of an unborn child. There is no state murder charge, largely due to the initial suicide ruling. He has been held without bail since his 2024 arrest, and has been decertified as a police officer.

[chris]

I was just recently reading about this case. Great post man.

[Gabriella]

Fantastic post. really amazing you got the photos in such clarity and definition.